Ubuntu

When Hegemonist Pig Man (hereinafter HPM) locked me out of my own file system with Microsoft Millenium, I went to Suse Linux, simply becuase that was what was most available at the time. Suse was fun and I got real used to it, but over the years, it made a number of engineering and marketing mistakes, the worst of which were HPM-esque marketing tactics. I’m sorry, there’s only room on this planet for one HPM, and when it comes right down to it, we don’t even need him.

So when early this year Suse locked me out as root on my own machine, I bid a tearful farewell to a losing wanabee, and went to Ubuntu for the exact same reason as the above. It had become most available. Ubuntu is based on the German distrubution Debian. I’m sure this name comes from the .de extension which is used for German documents in open source. Debian is a truly scary operating system if what you’re used to is Suse. Suse doesn’t hold your hand, but Debian basically says, “I’m sorry, but I won’t talk to you at all until you master my command line.” So I spent a couple of weeks doing that, finally succeeding in compiling a software package with a cranky obsolete version that cost me $12.50 at Borders Books, on a machine that was offline.

If you run open source, you get used to configuration nightmares. They come with the territory. But the saving grace is that these operating systems have self-healing capacities, which are increasing over time. A lot of times, after your machine has spent an hour giving you error messages which are basically discussions of your stupidity from its point of view, your best bet is to ignore it and go have a cup of coffee. leave it running, but just go away. Quite often, it will figure out the problem if you leave it alone for a while.

In this case the revelation about Ubuntu was getting on line with it. The first thing it did was to go find its daddy. There were 350 updates available. But better than that, I was able to download the current distribution release. So I went from “Intrepid Ibex” to “Jaunty Jackalope” in one fell swoop. Actually it took a couple of hours, but Suse never offered to change the entire release like that. And I find that Jackalope is really a lot more my speed.

I’m sorry, but German engineering is unbeatable. Ubuntu runs faster than Suse, and it does more. Its idea of software is that you tell it what you want, and then it goes online and finds it and installs it, without any further ado. And with respect to speed online, all of these operating systems leave Microsoft in the dust.

My machine is truly bilingual. My current operating system installation is in Chinese, with an English-speaking desktop, because I found that that was the best way to get instant availablility to Chinese language input, and a full range of Chinese fonts. I can switch languages with one mouse-click. This kind of installation also provides the ability to toggle to a broad range of third-world languages with other scripts. For example, I could also write Japanese, Tibetan, Hindi, Korean, or Thai if I had some reason to do that. This reflects the fact that HPM’s plot for world-domination has failed. Much of the third world prefers Linux, as well it might. It’s just more, um, human. if not to say humane.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Typing Chinese Online

This is something that I’ve been on the lookout for a while. I you go to the MDGB Chinese-English Dictionary, there’s a left sidebar with a “Type Chinese” link on it. That link opens a window which gives you a full range of input methods for typing Chinese. Of course, I prefer Mandarin Pinyin, always, but I realize that some people have other ideas, and that’s fine. The point is that now you no longer have to be at your own bilingual or Chinese machine to type Chinese. You can do it anywhere; you can type Chinese on any ordinary English-speaking machine that’s online, and answer Chinese email in Chinese (kewl!), or generate Chinese search terms without being bugged by Google’s new refusal to deal. (I think the Chinese government bought it out, again.)

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Ground-Breaking New Chinese-English Dictionary

The new MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary is far and away the best Chinese English dictionary I have ever encountered. There’s just no comparison with anything else that I’ve seen. This one gives you a list of usages in context as soon as you dump anything into its search window, before you even ask it to search. If it can’t find a meaning for a combination, it then gives you thirty or so approximations, which usually allows you get around Chinese typos and the perpetual and gratuitous attitudinizations of the Taiwanese, who are just ABOVE writing anything canonical, particularly if it has ever been polluted by the CCP, you know what I mean? (We’ll let it pass that most of the CCP actually SPEAKS Mandarin, and that the beche mere known as Taiwan Hua is simply an abyssmal failure to get anything straight either grammatically, lexically, or phonetically. We won’t notice that about the Taiwanese; it just makes them worse when we do that).

If you think that suddenly I have attitude, please look at this: ifeng.com (5) 美国佛教之路 – American Buddhism’s Journey. This would have been impossible to translate without the improvements represented by by this dictionary, because of the turgidity of the script, which is not a dialect. It’s just Taiwanese being cute.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Wikipedia Free Chinese-language Library

Wikipedia Free Chinese-language Library

I don’t know all of what this can do yet, but it’s the best Chinese dictionary I’ve ever encountered. It will grok even the most esoteric Buddhist terminology, as well as general Chinese terminology. The first unknown Buddhist term I put into it returned 50 pages of results.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

New Page on Ven. Xing Yun’s Doubled-up Blessing Posters for Earth Rat

Check it out: Blessing Posters What Ho? (dead link corrected -xp)

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping